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'The Walking Dead' Review: How Season 3 Went Wrong

We’ve come a long ways from the early days of AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’ and the show has strayed too far from its roots.

Update: I will need to write a Part Two review after the season finale. Virtually every one of my complaints in this post has been addressed in subsequent episodes, and Season 3 has been back on track with a vengeance. I’m extremely glad to see this, and have been enjoying the second half of Season 3 immensely.

There are many reasons for the decline of Season 3. What began as a tense fight for survival in a walker-infested prison quickly devolved into a series of small, disjointed conflicts too easily resolved and forgotten.

For the purposes of this review, we’ll take a look at some of the season’s most important conflicts and discuss why, at least so far, they haven’t worked. Note, these conflicts—to me at least—have succeeded in overshadowing and upstaging what is theoretically the central conflict of the season between our merry band and The Governor.

Rick vs. Rick vs. Lori vs. The World

I don’t buy Rick’s transformation from the good sheriff to either the angry dictator or the crazy hot-head. Nor do I like this transformation.

Rick has become in many ways the “anti-hero.” Done properly, the anti-hero can be a fascinating character.

Take Walter White from AMC’s Breaking Bad.

Walter gradually slips from upstanding citizen and high school chemistry teacher into ruthless meth cook. The transformation is gradual and believable and littered with foreshadowing. It’s not just that a good person becomes bad in Breaking Bad; it’s that this “good person” always had the potential to go bad in the first place.

Walter’s pride is his undoing, and when you watch the series a second time you see the clues of his hubris and pettiness in glaring detail.

But Rick Grimes is not Walter White. In the first two seasons he was the voice of reason, a calm presence and an earnest leader. Suddenly, in Season 3, we are to believe that he’s simply “snapped.” We are made to believe it was the betrayal and forced killing of Shane that has caused this; or the affair that wasn’t actually an affair between Shane and Lori.

I can’t choke down this much suspension of disbelief. I can’t accept a magical metamorphosis.

I don’t want the main character to just “snap” and change personalities overnight. His aversion to Lori felt beyond forced, out of character. It was a set-up for his later guilt, but it ended up making that later guilt feel just as forced.

While I could buy this sort of snap after Lori’s death, I can’t buy it at the beginning of the season (and the end of Season 2) and Rick’s character has become hard to watch and harder still to believe.

Worse, his faltering mental state is less interesting and I care much less about it thanks to the way the show’s writers transformed Rick for the first half of the season.

The decision to make Andrea a primary character with her very own central plot is perhaps the worst decision The Walking Dead creators have made in the entire run of the show. The only hopes of making it a mildly interesting narrative died with Dale in Season 2.

Andrea’s character has slipped from merely irritating and stubborn (in the first two seasons) to willfully blind and a terrible judge of character (in the first half of season 3) to flat-out ridiculous and awful in Sunday night’s episode when she decided that she’d stick around in Woodbury after the Governor pitted two of her friends (the Dixon brothers) against one another in a fight to the death.

She should have listened to Michonne in the beginning. Then again, it would hardly be fair to lay the blame for that entirely at Andrea’s feet.

Michonne, a katana-wielding warrior who rescued and cared for Andrea all winter, is basically incapable of normal human communication. There is no reason for this other than to create dramatic tension. The writers have simply decided to make it impossible for her to say perfectly normal things. Either she is meant to be very stupid or she is supposed to be the “silent type.”

But really, Michonne’s communication skills (or lack thereof) point to a much deeper problem with the show itself: communication errors are the root of all evil. While bad communication and the fallout of bad communication are a real world problem and a necessary narrative tool, at this point in The Walking Dead, communication failure is constant and unbelievable.

As blogger Jason Bittel writes, “You have so many sources for good, natural drama and yet they keep going back to the tactic used by daytime soaps—something happens to thwart sensible communication and everybody has to run around screaming for a few episodes until they can sit down and talk it out. It’s perpetually Act 3 of a rom-com.”

That Michonne has still not fully opened up about what happened in Woodbury and before is painfully nonsensical.

The only thing more nonsensical in the season thus far has been every single one of Andrea’s decisions, reaching fever pitch with Sunday’s episode and her mind-numblingly awful speech to the town peasants, all of whom suddenly believed, for no good reason whatsoever, that leaving the fortified town would somehow be a safer choice.

I’m not surprised to feel such intense dislike for Andrea who has always been a bad character, but Michonne had potential to be a real bad-ass zombie hunter. My real disappointment with Andrea is that she was chosen to be such a central figure at all. Which brings us to….

The Writers vs. The Audience

Here’s the thing, audiences will forgive a great deal. We will quite easily believe that the world has been overrun by zombies, and that some people have survived while most others have not. We can buy the silly magic science that caused all this.

What we can’t buy are characters who we don’t believe and can’t sympathize with. The show has taken enormous pains to kill off or scare away most of the likable characters (and virtually all of the black characters, for that matter) and it’s done so in a way that leaves us with a cast we don’t care to spend time with.

Now even the easy-going Glenn is sunk into his own despair. Rick is a madman. Hershel is not merely crippled, he serves no real function outside of sitting around at the prison. Andrea is an idiot. Michonne is an idiot. Daryl is a good character, but the show had to resurrect Merle and so off goes Daryl (for now) leaving us with basically Carl.

Now, if the show did something surprising—say the Governor killed Rick and then season 4 was all about Carl taking revenge, planning some mad guerrilla warfare against the Woodburians—maybe it could save itself from itself.

But at this point, we’ve had all set-up and no pay off. We had the original conflict with the prisoners that quickly dissipated. Why didn’t they stretch that conflict out? Why move on so quickly? There was an interesting drama to be had between the prisoners and the refugees, but instead it’s turned into several smaller dramas, a new pack of refugees, a conflict between the prison and Woodbury, a new baby, and on and on and on.

How can a show feel at once so dragged out and full of so many easy resolutions all at the same time?

Fundamentally, The Walking Dead has lost its way. It lost its way for the first time when it took the characters to the CDC; then again as it languished forever at Hershel’s farm; and now again as it squats its way through the prison. The show is best while it is on the move.

If the show insists on staying put, then its dramatic tension needs to be sustained by being heightened at a reasonable pace. Introducing side conflicts simply in order to drag out the longer conflict is a cheap trick. Sometimes the show feels like an episodic series masquerading as a story with a longer narrative arc. In that sense, it reminds me a bit of the shortcomings of Lost.

And so I tiptoe toward next Sunday with some trepidation. I want very badly to enjoy The Walking Dead, but I find that harder and harder to do. And really, when I think about it, I’ve found it harder and harder ever since the very first few episodes.

The moments early on in the show—Rick’s mercy killing of the zombie crawling through the park; the inability of the man he meets to shoot his zombie wife—were the best. That sense of something new, of a different way of looking at the zombie apocalypse, of a more human side to it all, is gone.

I think the show can come back from the brink. I do believe it still has the potential to become what it once appeared to be. But Sunday night’s episode has me worried that we are heading in another direction entirely.

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Subtle and gradual? Why? There was nothing subtle or gradual about his wife’s death, or the loss of his right hand man (Daryl) or or the revelation that a nearby community’s idea of entertainment is watching two brothers kill each other while spectators cheer. It was all dropped on him like a ton of bricks at once and this is all in addition to the fact that the zombie infestation is worse than it has ever been. What are you saying? That all of this stuff combined is not enough to drive a man to madness?

I’m not a psychologist, but I don’t believe that severe depression is a cause of schizophrenia. His anger and depression are more than justified, but the illusions are not. They seem completely out of place in the fictional reality that the narrative is trying to establish. However, they’ve been desensitized to enough violence and death that I don’t expect them to be crying on the floor every time something dramatic happens. The dialogue is the worst contender here. Each character seems incapable of interpreting their feelings and those of others, which causes unnecessary drama and poor character development. Unfortunately, I feel as though the series is focusing far too much on the drama caused by the characters rather than that which is caused by the main theme: zombies. While the social aspect of surviving a zombie apocalypse is definitely interesting, it seems as though the zombies themselves have taken to the back burner and only serve as cameos to remind you that there was an apocalypse not too long ago. I want my zombie survival series back instead of this petty drama.

Sadly I agree with some of your points…The first season of The Walking Dead quickly became my favorite show on television…the second season drag a little but I was willing to overlook it because it ended strong…

But Sunday night watching the show was too much. I ignored a lot. I understand what they are doing with Michonne and can overlook it…I have never been a huge Andrea fan and could overlook her bad judge of character because I didn’t really care….

But I liked Rick…I want to root for Rick…but his decent into madness is maddening for any fan. He got one of his people killed because he had a flashback to Shane…that bothered me. But the sudden appearance of ghost Lori maybe me ask, did this show just jump the shark?

Have you read the comic books yet? The paths of most of these characters are already predetermined. NO ONE is safe on this show.

The only part of this article I agree with is the part about Michonne and Andrea. What we see on screen is a pretty horrible interpretation of both characters in the book. Yes, she is quiet, but she talks way more on the pages than on the screen. And yes, it’s frustrating to watch. With Andrea the writers, at least personality-wise, are closer to the character as portrayed on page… but they still took a whole lot of creative liberties, and it seems to have back fired.

The show is still very good, in my opinion. And going forward people are going to be upset. Reminds me of the reaction people had near the end of the first season of Game of Thrones. This stuff is already written… it’s only going to get worse!

I’m not worried about anyone being “safe” on the show; I just want characters who I can like enough to keep wanting to watch them. This is made so much harder by the presence of Andrea. I’m still enjoying the show, too, but I keep wanting it to be better and that hampers my enjoyment especially when there are shows like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones out there.

Woodbury had an opportunity for the writers. Rick’s raid offered a natural way for the town to descend into fascism and madness with the governor. As it stands, the writers went the opposite way with the town’s reaction. That makes the townspeople buying back into the governor’s BS even more unbelievable. If Andrea’s character were smarter or savvier then this could be salvaged by making her a rival power to the governor. But one speech doesn’t magically make a character a believable leader so the writer’s would have hard work to do on that front. But that’s the only way I see to make her character useful.

I agree that Carl is the only one with a new arc left. Although Glenn’s character can get interesting if he decides to go rouge and seek revenge. Sort of a regression to his old loner self, but with his new instincts as a survivor.

But to the problem with this last episode is that it subverted the natural overall story arc. The episode should have been all about the budding conflict between Woodbury and the Prison. The Governor’s withdrawal, the townspeople’s reaction, Rick not even addressing the possibility of reprisal when he got back, Andrea being Andrea… A war is obviously coming, but no one seems to care. That was my biggest issue with the premiere.

I know this has been said in another comment but you clearly have not read the comic books. This whole show is trying to follow the comics, while adding in it’s own twists that I personally think are terrible. Granted the comic would be a little to graphic for TV but most of this has already played out. Sorry for the spoiler but Rick internally needs to fight this craziness to figure out if he can be a leader or not in a world that has changed so much. It has moved from the law abiding country that he worked in as a police officer to a survival of the fittest mentality that he has to learn about.

The one thing I can agree with is that Andrea has been a complete failure throughout the tv show. In the comic she is a great character and adds much to the story. Season 3 has made her better in my eyes compared to the annoying character she was in season 2 but the writers need to reline her with the comic or kill her off.

I’ve stated multiple times that I’ve not read the comic books. I chose not to in order to review the show on its own merits rather than in constant comparison to the comics (for instance, when I review Game of Thrones I can’t help but constantly compare the two and that doesn’t seem entirely fair.) However, even if the show is staying largely true to the comics that does not mean it’s doing it well for a TV audience. Rick does need to face his demons, I can accept that, what I can’t accept is how it’s been achieved in the show. Not that it’s bad acting, but that it doesn’t feel at all believable. It may come across much better in the comics, but that doesn’t mean it works when put on a screen.

Don’t worry it isn’t. The same basic things are happening (Rick becoming harder, Woodbury, etc..), but they are done in far more hamfisted, poorly-paced ways (The farm arc in the comic lasted less than 3 issues, definitely not a season). Rick’s change is more gradual, Andrea isn’t insufferable, Michone communicates.

It’s kind of a bummer, the prison is THE big arc of the series. It is where most of the character development for the characters takes place, and that without even factoring Woodbury into it. I feel like they are rushing through this too fasts too be effective.

I still probably prefer this season to season 2 though if only because things are actually happening.

I’d recommend you just read the comics, this is one of those cases where the source material is better in just about everyway.

Completely anecdotal story here. I attended the Dallas Comic Con Sci-Fi convention this weekend. Both Laurie Holden (Andrea) and Danai Gurira (Michonne) were in attendance. In the signing lines for both actors, there was a LOT of arguing about Andrea and Michonne, and whether their character actions made any sense. I doubt anyone had the courage to say something to the actors. On a personal level, both Laurie and Danai were very friendly to my son who is a huge Walking Dead fan.